


Quiet

by slightly_ajar



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Sensory Overload, macgyver fluff challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:34:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27667535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightly_ajar/pseuds/slightly_ajar
Summary: It gets very loud inside Mac's head, Desi helps make it quiet.Written for the MacGyver Fluff Challenge.
Relationships: Angus MacGyver/Desiree "Desi" Nguyen
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	Quiet

_Quiet, like silence, but not really silent, just that still sort of quiet, like the sound of a page being turned in a book, or a pause in a walk in the woods_

Mac had once been told that people always tell the truth when they’re sleeping. If you ask someone a question while they’re talking in their sleep they’ll answer honestly because, apparently, the subconscious mind can’t produce lies. Mac wondered if that was true occasionally, usually when Desi was muttering in the middle of the night, but he’d never tested the theory. Wheedling answers from Desi under the cover of darkness felt deceitful and Mac knew finding out she’d been manipulated made her fall into the stony silence people like them adopted when hurt. For her manipulation was dishonest, dishonesty was disloyal and disloyalty was a rejection. Telling lies meant you didn’t care enough about someone to help them with their truths. The truth could be difficult but she said that being difficult is often what made the best things so good. Anything Mac wanted to talk about with Desi he would say while they were both awake, he wasn’t interested in tricks or half coherent confessions. He wanted to know and understand Desi, as much as anyone can be known and understood, as much as he wanted her to know and understand him. 

Curled up on the bed next to him Desi snuffled and burrowed deeper into her pillow. 

They’d survived that day’s mission. Just. 

They’d hauled themselves back to the Phoenix when the op ended, sat through a debrief where decisions and actions were dissected then Mac and Desi headed home together. 

That was when the overload started. 

As Desi drove streetlights passed the truck in a regular rhythm of flash-blur, flash-blur, flash-blur that soon became a beat in Mac’s head. The beat fell into harmony with the hum of the car’s wheels and sped up, faster and faster, into a constant throbbing inside Mac’s skull. He started to think about the mission, what could have happened, what should have happened, what would have happened if the bullets had been fired from a different angle, if the grenade hadn’t landed perpendicular to the wall, if the aerosol can he’d picked up had been empty. 

Bozer, with his stoic expression and his quiet, ’its okay, bro,’ might have just survived the shockwave but the very British sounding harrumph Russ had made into the coms would have been his last word. Desi would have kept fighting for their lives until the bitter end – and the end would have been very bitter indeed - and Riley would have been the one who found the bodies. The kind heart she had tucked under her leather jacket would have been broken by that. 

Mac thought that if he’d moved sooner he could have created a distraction by redirecting the current flowing through the electricity conduit in the room they’d been in. The effectiveness of the rewiring would have depended on the amount of volts the system could have handled before it shorted out, of course. He should have realised that at the time. He should have seen. He should have done the math. Mac started to do the calculations, to know, to be sure, to stop the figures swirling around him. Numbers and possibilities and unanswerable questions about how, when, if and what screeched like harpies in his mind. Mac’s pulse thundered under his over-sensitised skin as white noise buzzed in his ears asking, judging and demanding, pushing him towards the edge of something deep and vast and terrible and lonely where he’d fail and fall and fall and fall and... 

“Mac?” The weight of one of Desi’s hands appeared on Mac’s knee. “Hey? Just breathe, okay?” 

“Yeah.” The feel of Desi’s touch pulled Mac’s awareness out of the chaos inside his head. “Yeah.” 

They made it to Mac’s house with him taking measured breaths steadying the feeling that he was about to vibrate out of his own skin and passed the door, the polar bear and the junk he was collecting for future projects and headed to the kitchen where everything was warm and smelled like cooking and care. 

Mac had brought things into his Grandpa’s house since he’d moved in but had only removed one of Harry’s possessions. The clock that used to be in the den had had to go. It was sitting in a box in the attic because Mac couldn’t bear how once he’d heard it’s tick, tick, tick he couldn’t tune it out. Mac swore he could feel the ghost of the clock’s metal part clicking on the back of his neck alongside every other thought and sensation that was crowding him for attention. 

Desi put a pan of soup on the stove for a simple meal that would fill the air with homely aromas as it heated up, and stood behind Mac with her hands and chin resting on his shoulders in a thick press of comfort. Mac closed his eyes and focused on the feel of Desi’s weight holding him, securing him, stalwart, honest and solid. The feel of her enveloping him was a welcome opposite to the thorn like screeches in his mind. 

“I’ve got you,” Desi whispered into the back of Mac’s neck. Her words cut through everything else, their softness more powerful than all that was screaming. 

They ate the soup, the food in Mac’s stomach helped ground him, then headed for Mac’s bedroom and curled up together on the top of his covers. 

It was still early in the evening but there wasn’t anywhere else Mac wanted to be. The bed was soft and safe and climbing onto it felt like stepping onto a life raft from a scuttled ship. Mac arranged the pillows and covers just so and lay down, shuffling so Desi could lay beside him with her head resting on his chest. Desi settled against Mac and patted him with the hand she had splayed over his heart. 

And it was quiet. 

The angry, scouring intensity howling inside Mac dissipated like a storm blowing itself out. His head and heart settled, steadied, like a compass’ needle finding north. Mac exhaled, emptying his lungs, then drew in a new breath to fill his chest afresh. Feeling the change in him Desi lifted her head and pressed a kiss against his shoulder before laying back down. The day had been a battle, at times literally for Desi, and she was exhausted. She grew heavy lying against Mac and eventually slipped into sleep. When Desi was fully relaxed against him Mac slid out from under her, covered her with a blanket and sat up with his laptop open in front of him. He wasn’t ready for sleep himself, not yet, but he didn’t want to move from the haven he and Desi had created. 

He tinkered with the projects on his computer and watched Desi’s chest rise and fall and her pulse beat in her throat. Her presence in his bed, her hand curling to grip the blanket he’d spread over her, were the realist things in the world. 

They were all still there, the facts, figures and potentials that had harried Mac hadn’t left him, they never did completely, but they’d moved far away and he was safe from their storm. The perfect curves and valleys of Desi were warm beside Mac. She was as vibrant and as careful as she always was, as gentle as a sleeper's sigh but as strong as a spin kick, a harbour in the tempest that surrounded him. 

Desi mumbled something about ‘not offside’, deep in her soccer match dream, and Mac turned the brightness of his laptop’s screen down to make sure he didn’t disturb her. 

The room wasn’t silent, LA never was, and a total absence of sound would have felt hollow. Instead there were the gentle whispers of breathing, the shift of movement against bedsheets and the distant noises of the people on Mac’s block living their lives. 

Mac listened to the quiet and was grateful. 

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for the story and the quote at the beginning comes from the wonderful song [ Quiet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDVaa3z8jHw) from the musical Matilda (it's ever so pretty, you should listen to it 😉). 
> 
> Someone once told me that if you ask someone questions while they’re asleep they’ll tell you the truth because sleeping people can’t lie. I have no idea if that’s right, I suspect probably not.


End file.
